Stories of the heart: American Jewish families respond to individualism

Market individualism is the hegemonic narrative in the United States, and powerful institutions are its apostles: they celebrate individual achievement and self-expression at the expense of collectivist ommitments. A scattered constellation of groups resists the market by cultivating familial and communal loyalties. In fifteen case studies of middle class observant Jewish families in California, I show how identities are constructed and meaningful lives created through family narratives that weave together elements of market hegemony and collectivist resistance. Among my respondents, family narratives were idiosyncratic, but could be grouped into two types and four sub-types: individualist (utilitarian & expressive), or collectivist (familist & communal). Utilitarian families found meaning in the individual pursuit of high achievement. Expressive families sought transcendence through self-awareness and self-expression. Familists cultivated relationships with one another and extended kin, while communalists built fictive kin ties with neighbors, friends and coreligionists.;My respondents inherited narratives from their parents and the institutions where they worked, studied or played. Yet many of them also broke their narrative chains. Some parents became defiant individualists because they had felt suffocated by the weight of mutual obligations in their families of origin, while others had experienced lonely childhoods and dove headlong into communal life. The key to sustainable family solidarity was not the preference for any particular narrative, but the capacity for mutual recognition. Families that listened to one another felt emotionally connected, and had ambiguous, malleable world-views that resembled ongoing conversations more than canonical stories. Intimacy was more fleeting, and solidarity more brittle, in families where one parent, often but not always the father, clung to a single world-view and feared narrative suffocation by other storytellers. In these families, a legacy of trauma or institutional oppression had made communication seem dangerous. In the final case study, the Hammer family became more intimate after acknowledging past traumas in family therapy and forcing themselves to communicate with one another. The implication is that families can mount a sustained, intergenerational resistance to market hegemony if they are fearless and resourceful: they must tolerate tensions between contradictory narratives and maintain fulfilling relationships with counter-cultural institutions.